You Named Things
by Avital Gad-Cykman
I count on you. Count on you. Still. Count. “A goose,” you said. “An iris.”
See, a lightning crossed the sky outside my window over and over today, and a fluorescent lamp lit other fluorescent lamps across the ceiling. The lightning reflected the fluorescent light and the fluorescent light reflected the lightning, and my fingers trembled against my thighs. When everything is named and is in its place, I can tell the west from the east. I can go places.
I head out, carrying a small backpack and walking down toward the port. Way south, between towns and behind a school, a cow still steals my sandwich, and you laugh. I am in peace, too, overlooking human epic. But when I return, years later, on the roadside sprouts a pale flower I cannot name.
I tell about you to this woman, whose skin is rigid yet fragile like the skin of the Earth. I didn’t know that every year was a bonus, when I felt blisters and lines spotting and crossing your palms. You walked like an explorer, and I walked like a landowner among landmarks named by you. “Go on,” says the woman. I try, although I hardly speak these days. Each word suspended in the air stretches the sky, and earlier words I said have the edge of a razor. Still. The woman stays for an hour. I count. Out she goes. Come in. I enter the torn spaces crossed by geese and stained by irises.
Avital Gad-Cykman, the author of Life In, Life Out (Matter Press), has work published in Iron Horse, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Prism International among others. Her work has been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s International Flash Fiction, The Best of Gigantic and elsewhere, and won the Margaret Atwood Society Prize, The Hawthorne Citation Award and other prizes. She lives in Brazil.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “You Named Things”? The origins: it starts with my childhood memories of my cousin, ten years older than me, taking me to fields I crossed running, and telling me the names of trees, birds and flowers. I felt then and I still feel gratefulness for the clarity of words that open way through the chaotic world of feelings and dreams. Unsurprisingly, he became a scientist.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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